How can I do a Find & Replace in Address Book?

Question

     I asked this question in a different forum & they suggested I post the same question here because someone might have an Apple Script?! 
Here is the link:  https://discussions.apple.com/community/feeds/messages?thread=3187576 but to keep things simple, I want to find certain words and phrases in the note section of my address book and update those to something else.  How can I accomplish this?
I have tried exporting and using numbers to make the changes but when I re-import those changes back to address book I get a huge mess of information.  Duplicate contacts and triplicate notes to say the least.  A suggestion was made to export ALL the information in the address book and then re-import it ( I was only exporting the names & notes previously ).  That poses new problems such as how to keep my custom categories in tacked.  Most of my contacts have things such as, 'John's Cell' and 'Susan's Work E-mail'.
Thanks in Advance!
R

Answer 1

The basic idea is as follows:
set keyWords to {"word 1", "word 2", "phrase 3"}
repeat with thisWord in kewWords
          tell application "Address Book"
                    set p to (every person whose note contains thisWord)
  -- modify the text - depends on what you're trying to do
          end tell
end repeat
exactly what code you need to modify the text will depend on how you want to modify it, but the basic idea will be something like (using text item delimiters):
          tell application "Address Book"
                    set q to my tid(p's note, thisWord)
                    set p's note to my tid(q, replacementText)
          end tell
on tid(input, delim)
          set {oldTID, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, delim}
          if class of input is list then
                    set output to input as text
          else
                    set output to text items of input
          end if
          set my text item delimiters to oldTID
          return output
end tid